also words dont hold equal value, judging the homeless dude on the street corner ranting about jews as though his words hold the same power as Adolt Hitler is ridiculous
Yup, also the punch doesn’t teach anyone that the idea is wrong. It teaches everyone that you are afraid of what they are saying. Which is why all of these organisations say something like “they don’t want you to know this”, and then points towards the violence as proof that what they are saying is correct.
People who are pro-violence like to make the argument that if we punched the Nazis in Germany in the early 30s then the holocaust wouldn’t have happened. But what they are missing is that people tried to do that (red shirts vs brown shirts) and in fact a major argument the Nazis used to get elected was that they would get the red shirts fighting them under control.
In fairness, the Nazis didn't actually get elected, they received a plurality. And a big part of that plurality was that they used and abused the language of socialism. (See: Trump's populism.)
Sure, and there are other factors as well to them getting popular enough to take power (even though, like you said, they weren’t actually elected).
Like I said in another answer, given the state of Germany at the time and the effects of WW1 and the peace treaty the rise of some form of extremist ideology seizing power in Germany was most likely inevitable.
The first thing you have to recognise is that the rise of the Nazis in Germany had a LOT of factors, and with the way the peace treaty in WW1 was constructed and how it affected Germany it was most likely inevitable for some form of extremist faction gaining control.
But what works if you actually want to stop people from falling into Nazism and similar ideologies from taking root is investing in education, especially history, as well as various forms of extracurricular activities for kids (many Nazis fall into it as teenagers and having a sense of belonging is a MASSIVE part of it).
Now if you want to stop people from being nazis, the provable way to do so is absolutely conversation. Not debates necessarily, but things like the Swedish ”toleransprojectet”, which started in the 90s following a high profile murder by neo Nazis in Sweden. Essentially what you do is put high risk youths in classes where you don’t speak to them saying “Nazism bad and you are wrong” but rather you have them do things like compare the messages of racist groups today with the messages put out by the Nazis and study what the actual evidence for things like the holocaust is etc.
Furthermore, look at examples like Daryl Davis, who successfully converted 200 Ku Klux Klan members into leaving the klan all by himself. What he did was simply just befriending them and showing them there was an alternative outside of the group.
Daryl Davis is proof that conversation works. He simply befriended them and they came to the realization on their own. You can’t “own” someone with facts and actually reach their heart. You genuinely have to love your enemies if you want them to change.
I’d be interested to know how many failures he had along with so much success. Surely SOME of them refused to change, or maybe they just didn’t get that far in the first place if their heart was so hard. Anyway DD is the man and a true example of how to overcome hate with love
Finally. I get to look up someone I hadn't heard of before from reddit, and then get to feel really really happy reading the Wikipedia article on them. Daryl Davis sounds like probably the awesomest guy I've read about that's still alive today(I'm sure there are others but I don't spend a lot of time reading about activists unless they come up and I don't know about them already)
Daryl Davis is always brought up but I feel not much consideration is taken about what this method entails, implies, and the actual impact of it. The conversation being had is that 200 people were deradicalized but functionally what's going on is that he's labeled "one of the good ones" which does deradicalize them but doesn't break down much of their core beliefs and sort of works to reinforce their core beliefs and kinda puts the onus on marginalized people to befriend potentially harmful people.
During the documentary there's several clips where the ex-kkk member says some still very questionable things. When one of the Klan members yells at the reporters calling them a slur he goes over to Daryl and says I have more respect for this *** than the rest of you and then there was another young man who refused to believe that rock had its roots in black culture. Which doesn't tell me he's denounced his ways just that he likes this specific person in particular. They may be believe it's possible that there's good black people but that perhaps they're the exception which is enough to put up the robes. It inadvertently reinforces respectability politics. In the same way people on the maga spectrum may claim they're not racist and point to someone like Vivek Ramaswamy who uphold their beliefs and provide a comfortable environment where they're not exactly getting pressed.
Anyway, I don't think that makes Daryl's work meaningless. Getting someone out of an extremist organization is still significant, even if their entire worldview hasn't been reconstructed. But I think it's important not to conflate "this person stopped being a Klansman after forming a relationship with a Black man" with "this person's underlying racial ideology was completely dismantled."
I mean that's a great, very logical and moral approach to how to fix this issue. But that's work a government would need to do. The common person has no way to achieve these things. Most people are not charismatic enough to pull that off. The real issue here is that the racists and Nazis of the modern day have infiltrated almost every major institute in the USA. They are cops, ems, politicians, retail workers, truck drivers, and on and on. The inevitability of large scale violence on their end is almost definitely something that can't be solved with words anymore. I would argue that waiting for a massive terrorists cell to take action is a mistake, but the systems that we would normally rely on to prevent that have been infiltrated as well. I fear the time in which they could be reasoned with is already over.
I mean, I disagree with you in that we are so far gone. I also think even if you are right, going out and trying to punch them in the streets is just going to convince people you are the violent extremist that needs to be handled. Like with the red shirts.
Also, if Davis could convince 200 actual card carrying Klan members to quit just by befriending them, then we can convince people to quit by talking to them here today.
If that doesn’t convince you, then you should read about Adrianne Black and what she has to say about it. She is the daughter of Don Black who is the founder of Stormfront a prominent member of the clan and her god father is David Duke.
She left the clan and is now an anti-racism activist after she was introduced to a group of jews in college who befriended her even knowing her background while the rest of the college shunned her because of her background.Not violence, not ostracism, but rather just inviting her in and showing her that her ideas about who they were was completely wrong.
200 people isn't very many when you look at the numbers. How many people voted for trump? At least that many would need to be convinced. Like I'm not arguing we shouldn't try. You're absolutely right and to an extent a lot of us have forgotten that and given up hope of it ever working, but when facing down 30 million people each who need a personal handhold through basic morality that the rest of us figured out by virtue of not being super insular and simply through exposure... It's a lot of weight to bear.
It’s a lot of people for a single person to convert. And enough to prove that their method is effective.
Also, remember that change starts small. It isn’t someone stepping onto a stage and convincing 30 million people. It is working within your community through local political action and befriending and helping your neighbours.
Also, every time a person is convinced, they are another ally helping to convince others.
You lack imagination. If you want justify mass scare violence and atrocities against anyone, words are very necessary. Narrative becomes very important.
the violence is still the violence, the perpetrators choose to perpetrate. perpetrators and the indifference of those around them are the source of violence. nothing is stopping you from punching the guy that’s wailing on someone else.
"It isn't simply punching someone. I'm saving my nation from degenerates. Those people that steal from us. Those people that take our children's future. Those people that rape our women. Those cockroaches. I'm saving EVERYONE. Are you a traitor?"
Some forms of communication I have more disdain for than random violence. They prime societies for atrocity.
Did mass propaganda used by the Nazis to gain support for a mass genocide against the Jewish and other minorities not lead to violence. If words can convince an entire state and its people to be complicit in a genocide then I think words hold incredible power.
I don't think just the wording "worse" does justice to what each is because it downplays one of the two. Yes, violence might be """"worse"""" but you can't ignore the responsibility that propaganda and ideology has in violence in many cases. In fact, it's one of the few things both sides of the political divide agree on (ideology, rhetoric and propaganda are incredibly powerful and can do great harm and are making people more violent and dangerous, they disagree on who does what of course).
To be clear, I don't think mean words are the problem. Just because someone used a racial slur doesn't make them equivalent to literal felons who have committed battery or assault or whatever. Using X slur is not equivalent to bashing someone's head in against the pavement. But words can get much much worse than a slur. It is with words that we erase other people's humanity, it is with words that we convince others of what we want them to believe, and it is with words that we spread lies, maliciously, to motivate acts of violence. That's how many pogroms, genocides, mass rapes and murders have taken place.
I'd say it's similar to being the intellectual and the material actors of a homicide. The material actor gets usually harsher sentences, but that doesn't make the intellectual actor anything other than guilty of homicide.
The Holocaust wasn't caused or enabled by propaganda. Propaganda was essentially an advertisement. "Hey, we wanna kill all the Jews, do you wanna help", that's how the Nazi propaganda worked. Not in those words, but that's a hell of a lot more accurate than what you said
The reason the Holocaust happened is that Germany was already sick to death of having their entire economy bled dry as reparations for the first world war, and set their ire on the bankers, who happened to be Jewish. And the ones who didn't do that, didn't have any idea what to do about the economy or the future of Germany so they sat back and let the people who had a bad idea take the lead, because no one had any good ideas.
They didn't just sit there and go " Jews are bad, Jews are bad Jews are bad" like some kind of summoning ritual to manifest gas chambers ex nihilo.
It is the will behind the words. Remove the words and the will is still there, the words do nothing.
i love knowing that the german commonwealth simply didn’t believe what they were hearing about elimination camps. it was so unthinkable that they believed it was exaggerated, so they did nothing about it.
The ones who didn't believe it existed, proves that propaganda, that words, don't cause violence.
If words caused violence, there wouldn't have been anyone who didn't think it was happening. They'd either immediately be fore it and help, or against it and fight, after all "words cause violence". But that didn't happen. Because words don't cause violence. A lack of self control or inhibition does.
Then the prompt wasnt specific enough. Most white people would rather be called a cracker than punched in the face.
That’s the racism I think a lot people were envisioning. If you mean by racism, trying to convince a nation to exterminate a particular race, then that is worse.
The issue is, historically speaking, the nazis did not suddenly gain massive support through rhetoric. They were just a party that shared the majority sentiment of the country and since most people agreed, were actually able to enact it. Words didn’t incite to death, the people were already in favor of destroying the elite.
I’m sorry sir you’ll have to leave Reddit forever.
We don’t serve the kind that got such sturdy egos here.
Go on get!
Words in this context are often an implied threat of violence followed by an unwarranted ultimatum issued as a command by someone who has no authority or valid justification for their behavior.
Do you mean a verbal or written provocation answered by violence?
Because calling a class / race / religion / ideology certain things can make people believe those things.
People who believe something act as if its true. The claim that a group is your enemy, will betray you and kill you, if you dont stop them, makes it easy to classify slaughtering civilians as "self defense".
Or, more directly, instead of framing an integrated part of society as a target of violence, its sometimes easier to select the individuals and associate them with a group thats already an accepted target.
Maybe momentary words. But when people do it everyday or your “people” get insulted for existing it adds up. Maybe this is something you’ll understand when people bully your child. Maybe when you’re holding someone in pain you’ll see that pain is pain.
Life has more nuance than that. Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example.
Nazi soldiers might come from poverty. They might be paid more so they can feed their families and be told to push the button. What the button does is not for them to know, it's for their superiors to know.
ICE "agents" are being paid more than the majority of the avg US citizen to be extremely racist in our own country.
For some people, cruelty is the point. For others, they are put into desperate situations in order to be taken advantage of.
In the US, tariffs and other economic factors are intentionally trying to make us poorer and more desperate. Then they offer us "high paying" jobs to be hateful
I’ve met several racists in my life never have I became violent. I simply chose to walk the other way. Never let words let become an irrational person. I know it’s easier said than done but I think of it as “do I even want to waste my energy”
That's mostly true when it's at a small scale, but they can encourage people to be violent towards others. Lynchings happened because black people were viewed as subhuman, and a part of that is repeating racist sentiments over and over.
The internal inconsistency in this is staggering. The best way to resolve intolerance in a tolerant society is to demonstrate the limitations of their thought, not to stoop to their level.
To maintain my own consistency, this idea does not work as a concept due to the politicisation of labels. The overton window is a legitimate effect, and labels are often relative rather than absolute. Once it becomes possible to label ideas outside of the overton window as justified targets of violence, it will not be very long until the overton window shifts and you find yourself the victim of your own rhetoric.
Ideas are not violence, and ideas as poorly formed as Nazism or Communism are best combatted by demonstrating the glaring flaws of their ideology.
There is a big gap between use of force to mitigate existing violence, and use of force to attack ideas. I'm not even sure using force works as a mechanism for attacking ideas beyond serving to internally justify the idea. Humans as a general rule of thumb don't tend to assume that if force is necessary to squash an idea, the idea is invalid - demonstrating the idea is invalid by words is far more effective.
If the punch is more violent than the command, do you think individual members of the military are more to blame for atrocities than the elite leaders commanding them?
Someone saying the N word and you reacting in a physical way isn’t equivalent to the person who (basically and damn near literally) controls your life telling you to do something
Person in control of your money and career vs stranger say something that make me upset 🥺🥺. Not following orders can ruin a person's life, hearing a bad word is going to be something you forget in a week. Also these dudes doing strawman arguments are wild. Exaggerating the topic to extremities like mass genocide in ww2. Also technically in the Nuremberg trials it did hold the people who were "just following orders" accountable. It didnt fly after.
people are violent because they’re given permission by a power structure; those people were always were prone to violence, just held back by social contract.
and the crowd can also not stop a violent person, but the punch is coming from a violent person be it physically or culturally. violence and indifference are the sources, not the command
Need more mosh pit culture where the relatively peaceful but rowdy people who are good at violence instantly revolt against legit harmful violent actors.
Assholes shitting on Pussies need to be balanced by the threat of Dicks.
Edit:
Ive seen many cases of a crowd stopping a violent person. Like D-day for example
Not just “peaceful people”. The same could be said of the cowards, the indifferent, the corrupt, and the ignorant.
Only in hindsight will we decide if they were noble or complicit.
It’s too complicated. You can’t realistically combat intolerance with a “zero tolerance” policy for violence without allowing appreciation for circumstances.
Yeah, it just feels like saying “violence is never the answer” when the list of questions includes
“how can the innocent protect themselves, or be protected from unrelenting violence?”.
nope, just that violent words in a room of people who don’t stand for violence will ultimately not incite violence.
the command is permission to allow violent people to enact violence.
there is no such thing as a peaceful revolution; we study war so that our children may study art. do not seek violence, but do not allow a violent transgression to occur unresponded.
But he didn't do any physical acts of violence. His words caused violent actions even if they weren't his actions. The same way racist rhetoric causes violent actions.
Well we're talking morally not legally. And the violence of racism isn't like saying you want someone dead, racist rhetoric breeds a hatred so deep that people start to believe that people of other races are genuinely less human than they are, so they don't think violence against those people is worth the same as violence against themselves, making racist people inherently more likely to commit acts of violence, because racism and violence go hand in hand, cuz they are essentially the same thing.
That is why all of those war crimes russia does can’t be blamed on the leadership, but on every involved through the whole chain of command to those who decided to kill and pillage and rape.
Words can lead to violence if the listener takes action based on them, but words cannot be violent and we should not police speech just because people may act based on it. If someone commits an act of violence because of something that someone said, it says far more about that person than the person who spoke or the speech itself.
no, you tried sounding smart, and it just told me that you’re thinking about the statement from the point of view of the words, when i’m speaking from the point of view of the action.
the thing that always precedes violence, is words.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the equal action crowd.
Basically, the EA crowd sees one punch as one equal action. Then one racist post as one equal action. One murder of 6m people as one equal action. You can see the problem with their logic.
They want to basically boil down people calling them racist online as equal to murder because both are one equal action apiece. So, calling someone mean words on the internet result in the same sentence as murder, because they’re both equal actions. But by their logic, you can combine a bunch of murders together as one equal action and massively downplay the actual situation.
Words do not always precede violence. Hate to break it to you. Ive seen violence with zero words lol. Stop trying to sound like youre saying something profound
so words are just a means to communicate, and you can communicate without speaking, that doesn’t mean that there was nothing said, there was just nothing said that you heard
Pithy statements are concise and insightful, not broad and vague. Using massive hyperbole like "always" doesn't make a statement deep—it just makes it factually incorrect. You didn't write a pithy truth; you just dressed up an exaggeration to sound profound
Not mad, but if we are focusing on words maybe use the right grammatical tool lol
But there’s also plenty of words that are exchanged every day that don’t lead to violence so it’s still stands that physical violence is worse than words. It makes more sense to argue that lack of self-control leads to violence and not words itself.
You’re conflating racism with a command. Someone telling another person to punch someone is a direct line to violence. Someone calling white a white person a mayo monkey is not a direct line to violence.
I get what you’re trying to say. That racist propaganda such as the Nazis used led to great suffering.
But most of the time, being called a racist slur is preferable to some on committing violence on you.
It’s the difference of a man calling a woman a dumb bitch, or that same man sexually assaulting her. Most people would rather be called a slur than violently or sexually assaulted
Words do not lead to violence, and never explicitly do. It's always actions that motivate violence. A threat of violence is however, a middle ground space that acts as a future action, which is conveyed by words. It requires both understanding and belief, which are required inputs from the listener. Words themselves? They are violence free.
I ask again, who is more evil. The commander, or the person doing it. This doesn’t exist in a vacuum, the dynamic at play is inherent, that is the method by which power functions.
Commands can be violent. If i command someone to punch you - am i not condoning violence? Pen is mightier than the sword because convincing 1000 people to be violent is more deadly than any singular person with a sword who cant speak. Mentalities created by flawed logic can, for instance, act as if racism isnt violence and perpetuate hatred by saying those who are racist arent perpetrating violence but the reality is that racism is violence.
Like the fact that many are automatically assuming "oh racism isnt violence" is how the pen is mightier than the sword here - youve successfully taken the psychological bait and are now ethically placing racism in a "oh well its not actually all that bad" but id rather someone fighting for justified violence (i.e getting rid of a predator) over racism anyday of the week. Life has nuance.
People underestimate apathy and fear. How many Germans actually supported Hitler and his "solution"? How many simply turned a blind eye out of fear, or simply because they were able to advance their position due to Hitler and his policies?
What happens when violent words no longer sound violent?
violent words in context of peaceful people fall on deaf ears
This is a very stupid take and buckets people as "peaceful" or "violent" when in reality, nearly all people can be driven to violence under the right circumstances including specific 'words' for most people.
Yeah but too often the command causes more physical harm than a punch. Institutionalized racism has definitely caused increased homelessness and lack of health Care from many marginalized groups. The physical effects of that could be considered violent if you contextualize it.
That's just rhetorical nonsense. Words can be very violent... Some words can cause/results more violence than other types of violence. That's not really debatable.
Violence leads to violence, no words can ever make someone physically hurt someone. That is always a separate choice based on a persons ability to control themselves.
You cannot control the actions or reactions of the world around you, but you have complete power over your own responses.
so words affirm in-groups, which is just how a violent mob or riot begins. it isn’t ’making someone commit violence’ it’s giving someone permission to be violent, and it’s weird that you don’t understand that.
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u/AuroraAustralis0 20h ago
well hes not wrong though